Mike Ashby materials-over-the-ages plot critique

Tom's critique of Ashby's predicted decline of metals and rise of ceramics/composites — argues Ashby bought into 1980s ceramics fever.

Now let's go into — I used to say, availability and cost were the primary drivers. I did talk about Mike Ashby, and he has this plot in his books that gives the use of materials over the ages. He's a structural materials person — there's a structural materials course — and so he talks about basically metals, polymers, elastomers, composites, and ceramics and glasses. So four classes of materials. He has a very nonlinear scale here, starting out 10,000 BC and moving up to 5,000 BC, so it's nice and linear every 5,000 years, and then it jumps to every century, and then it jumps every ten years — sort of an interesting scale, but it gives him the shape of the plot he wants.